Wednesday, April 12, 2017

The ridiculous EPA budget cut

While the Trump budget horror is unlikely to be as bad as written for the EPA (as this article alludes to), the present Administration is still dead-set on trying to kill a lot of programs that protect our environment. That has already been demonstrated, and is sure to be demonstrated numerous times in the future, to our great misfortune.

So I'm just going to pull some of the horrific stuff out of this New York Times article:

"The agency is taking an equal-opportunity approach to regional cleanup programs, proposing to virtually eliminate all of them: Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, Lake Champlain, Long Island Sound, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, South Florida, the Great Lakes."

Great.

"The Superfund program can actually save taxpayers money, because it lets the E.P.A. identify polluters and compel them to pay for the cleanup. But the proposed budget reduces its enforcement and remedial components by 45 percent, bringing it to $221 million from $404 million."

Wonderful.

The Trump administration has declared its intent to roll back business-killing regulations. But the second-biggest item eliminated from the proposed budget, after the Great Lakes Restoration project, exists precisely because federal regulations do not cover all pollutants. The $165 million Nonpoint Source Grant program helps states deal with pollutants from sources that are not directly regulated under the Clean Water Act — like the phosphorus that flows into Lake Erie from fertilizer, which feeds algae and weeds that starve the water of oxygen, harming fish and other wildlife. Among other remedies, the nonpoint source grants have been used to help states create “buffer strips” — areas of thick vegetation that help filter the contaminated runoff.

The proposed budget would eliminate the grants.

Superb.

As we can see, the proposed budget is chock-full of spectacular terrible horror stories for the environment of the U.S.A.